« Why is society a mess? The present human condition is absurd. We are in a cognitive renaissance, yet our world is in peril. We need to realize a deeper harmony of theory and practice—we need ideas that dare to dream big, that draw on the vast wealth of contemporary thought to guide and unite subjects in one mission. The way of the world is only a reflection of how we choose to think, and for more than a century we have delved endlessly into thought itself. If we truly learn from our thought, knowledge and application become imminently interrelated, not increasingly separate. It is imperative that we abandon preconception, pretense and prejudice, and ask with naive sincerity: “How should things be, really, and how can we make it happen?”

This pertains more generally to the irresponsibly ad hoc nature of society—we find ourselves entrenched in inadequate systems. »

« The 2-dimensional directed type theory of Licata and Harper has semantics in 1-categories, with a syntax that distinguishes between co- and contra-variant dependencies; but since the 1-categorical structure is “put in by hand”, it’s not especially synthetic and doesn’t generalize well to higher categories.«